16% of all deaths worldwide are caused by pollution

9 million people die every year from pollution. This is 16% of all deaths worldwide and three times more deaths annually than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined. In 2015, deaths from pollution were 15 times greater than from all wars and other forms of violence globally. These findings are presented in a major report by The Lancet Commission on Pollution and Health released in October 2017.
According to the Lancet Commission, pollution is the largest environmental cause of disease and premature death in the world today, and in the most severely affected countries pollution-related disease is responsible for more than one death in four.
Outdoor air pollution caused some 4.5 million deaths in 2015 (largely from vehicle and industrial emissions) and indoor air pollution (mainly from wood and dung cooking fires) caused around 2.9 million deaths. Air pollution deaths were largely as a result of heart disease, stroke and lung cancer. According to the Commission, the next biggest killers were polluted water (often from sewage) which was linked to 1.8m deaths mainly from gastrointestinal diseases and parasitic infections. Workplace pollution, including exposure to toxins and carcinogens resulted in 800,000 deaths. Lead pollution, the one metal for which some data was available, was linked to 500,000 deaths a year.
The report provides a comparison and reconciliation of global estimates of deaths from pollution between the two main sources of global mortality estimates; the Global Health Observatory of the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) estimates published most years by The Lancet. The Lancet states that its previous GBD study was “the most comprehensive worldwide observational epidemiological study to date.”

Latest research supports the work many years ago of Robert Howarth at Cornell who argued that leakages and other abnormal emissions of methane during fracking and other oil and gas operations erased the carbon advantage of natural gas over coal.

Environmental Indexes

From Our Files

Based on the latest results from WHO air pollution is now the world’s largest single environmental health risk, linked to 12% of all global deaths. Citizen scientists can contribute to measuring air pollution using a low cost sensor measuring atmospheric particulate matter and share the measurements via open source geospatial web mapping software.

Improved data coverage and analysis has made it possible to reconstruct temperature profiles across most ocean basins and at all depths to 6000 meters (m) from 1960 to 2015. The reconstructions reveal accelerating heating in the upper layers above 2000 m. Ocean warming is stronger since the late 1980s compared to the 1960s to the 1980s.

As the Earth warms, permafrost soils melt and this old carbon is released into the atmosphere as methane and CO2. Using radiocarbon dating of methane bubbles and soil organic carbon from lakes formed by melting thermafrost in Alaska, Canada, Sweden and Siberia combined with remote sensing it is found that methane and carbon dioxide releaed in the Arctic region during the past 60 years is much less than the CO2 contributed annually from anthropogenic and other sources.

In this study the global average surface temperature over the past 2 million years has been derived from deep sea cores. The results reveal that global cooling occurred about 300,000 years before the rapid ice sheet growth and the development of the first 100,000-year glacial/deglacial cycle about 800,000 years ago.